Alberta grain bin being used for art purposes

Aug 25, 2016

Visitors can go inside the bin for a unique view

Visitors of the Coutts Centre for Western Canadian Heritage near Nanton, Alberta, can go inside a grain bin to see everything - except grain.

Artist Donald Lawrence modified the grain bin into a camera obscura.

Camera obscuras use a lens and mirror to project a live view of its surroundings into a dark room.

“It has the ability to have the lens and mirror that are at the top of it rotate 360 degrees,” Lawrence told Global News. “The lens and the mirror carry inside an image of the surrounding landscape which you see before you on the table in the middle.”

When inside the bin, visitors can see a live, rotating image of outside the bin.

Lawrence said these types of rooms gave researchers a sense of how human eyes work and helped photography advance its technology.

“The camera obscura became largely obsolete as a technological scientific device,” Lawrence said.

Jim Coutts, who the centre was named after, was an avid art collector and donated his farm to the University of Lethbridge after passing in 2013.

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